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1/20/14 11:50 AM

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Home ! PSYC 101 02 - Spring 2014 - S. Walters ! 20 January - 26 January ! Statistics Worksheet - due 6 PM Friday Jan. 24
Navigation Home My profile Current course PSYC 101 02 - Spring 2014 S. Walters Participants 20 January - 26 January Statistics Worksheet due 6 PM Friday Jan. 24 My courses

Statistics Worksheet - due 6 PM Friday Jan. 24

Statistics Worksheet Spring 2014 This assignment is designed to take you through some of the basics of descriptive and inferential statistics. Successful completion will reflect a good understanding of these basic principles. Its important to understand that statistics are just a tool that allow you to understand your results (i.e. descriptive stats help you to understand large amount of data with single indices like averages, standard deviation, etc.), and to determine whether your results are just accidental and therefore not supportive of your prediction, or are real, and can be generalized to the population at large (as shown by inferential statistics). You have designed a survey to test the following prediction: Grades are related to sleep. As an impoverished psychology student, you have no money or resources to investigate this in an experiment, so you decide to do a descriptive study and survey 100 students. You design a questionnaire that gives you two pieces of information for each student: hours of sleep per night on average and last semesters grade point average. You are going to look at the strength of the relationship between these two variables. Your null hypothesis is that there is no relationship between grades and sleep. Use Appendix A to work through the assignment (see information in parentheses for specific page numbers, tables and figures that will help you with the assignment). You will need a calculator. (If you have Excel or something similar, it is easy to do the calculations for standard deviation and Pearson correlation by setting up your columns of data, and adding columns of data automatically such as those in A-4.) Submitting your assignment: Use the Assignment link on Moodle. Please save your file as a pdf before uploading it. Grading: 9-10 questions correct = 5/5; 7-8 questions correct = 4/5; 5-6 questions correct = 3/5; <5 questions correct = 0 - 2/5 Here are your data for the first 10 subjects:

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Assignment

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hours of sleep 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 8 5 6 7 9 4 5 7 8 8

GPA 2.5 3.1 3.4 3.2 4.0 2.2 3.0 3.1 1.9 3.4

1. With 10 subjects you can easily eyeball the data to get a sense of it. With large numbers however, this would be impossible a frequency polygon would be useful in these cases. For each variable, construct a frequency distribution (i.e. Table A-2 page 699) and a frequency polygon (Fig A2). 2. Compute the mean, median and mode for both variables. How similar are the three measures of central tendency for each variable? 3. Calculate standard deviations for both variables. What does a high standard deviation tell you about the range of scores, compared to a low standard deviation (for the same variable)? 4. If one subject has an extreme score, that can affect your descriptive statistics. If subject # 5 reported 11 hours of sleep instead of 9 for example, the mean is going to shift upwards, whereas the median will remain unchanged. Recalculate the mean, median, mode and standard deviation using 11 instead of 9 for hours of sleep for this subject and compare these with the originals what did you notice? Use the original score for the remaining calculations. 5. Produce a scatter plot of the 10 pairs of scores (Fig A-7), and report what you observe about the relationship between the variables.
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Assignment

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6. The Pearson correlation coefficient (r) for these data = 0.40. What does that tell you about how accurately you could predict someones GPA if you knew how many hours of sleep they got? (p. 707-709) 7. A correlation between 10 pairs of data has to be at least 0.55 to be significant at p<.05 (page 711). What can you therefore conclude about your results? 8. Your sample of 100 students is taken from psychology students in PSYC101 at CapilanoU. Is this is a random sample of students? Explain. 9. What are 3 potential reasons why there might be a positive correlation between hours of sleep and GPA. 10. What can you say about your original prediction, based on the work you have done here? What conclusions can you draw? What can you say about sleep and GPA in general?

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Submission status Grading status Due date Time remaining Add submission Nothing has been submitted for this assignment Not graded Friday, 24 January 2014, 6:00 PM 4 days 6 hours

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